


Like Real People Do

by andtheblueberrymuffins



Series: Like Real People Do [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: 'Shiro', Clones, F/M, Implied/Referenced Mind Control, Mind Control Aftermath & Recovery, Post-Season/Series 03, Speculation about Shiro post season 3, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-09-02
Packaged: 2018-12-20 04:57:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/andtheblueberrymuffins/pseuds/andtheblueberrymuffins
Summary: Shiro knows this is wrong. Everything is wrong. But they need him. Keith said so, and Shiro knows, he knows, that if they need him he has to help them. It’s what he would do. It’s what he does. (Everything is fine.)Or: The one where something is very wrong with Shiro after his second escape from the Galra.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, this has been eating my brain for a while, and I gave in and wrote it. It is complete, but I'm posting it in chapters because it works better that way. I'll be posting Saturday, Tuesday and Thursdays.

Shiro stares at the mirror.

There are long strands of hair, inky dark, caught on his shoulders and fallen in the sink, curling over the edge of it like tentacles. The razor hums in his hand; he’d found it in one of his drawers and he had thought… He knows how to cut his hair. He knows what it ought to look like. 

He stares at the mirror.

The hair is wrong. It’s… too long on the sides. Too short on the top. It doesn’t look the way he sees it in his head; he doesn’t understand why. He knows how to cut his hair. He hasn’t forgotten. He didn’t forget before. Not the first time the Galra took him and they didn’t have him for as long this time.

But it’s wrong. And his eyes are wrong. His face is wrong. He—

He braces his hands on the sink, ribs pinching in on his lungs, squeezing. He tastes something in his mouth, bitter and slick, he sees a Galra face, obscured by pale liquid. The sink creaks and gives beneath his metal arm, and he jerks back, staring at the indentations he left behind.

It’s wrong. This is wrong. Everything is wrong. But they need him. Keith said so, and Shiro knows, he knows, that if they need him he has to help them. It’s what he would do. It’s what he does. (Everything is fine.)

#

None of them comment on his wrong hair, or his wrong face, so he thinks maybe he is just imagining it. Maybe he just hasn’t seen himself in a while. Maybe it’s time for a change. No one comments when he can’t pilot his Lion, when she just sits there, inert, under his hands.

He can fly her, he can. He remembers doing it, the way his hands curled around the controls, the noise of the cockpit, the flashes of light that always accompanied a battle. But he can’t remember how to make her work, all he can remember is sitting in her and it doesn’t matter how many times he tries that, it doesn’t do any good.

He doesn’t remember other things, either, as it turns out.

There are times when someone asks him something, or makes a joke about something and looks at him like they expect him to laugh, and he just… draws a blank. It’s like parts of his memory didn’t make it back with him to the Castle, like they’re still there, back in Galra hands. He hates that feeling, it makes him itch, under his skin. The worst of the itch is in his right arm, under layers of metal and circuitry, a phantom sensation he can’t shake.

Pidge says that this is all normal, likely just a way for his mind to process trauma, and then Keith shoots her a glance, and she looks guilty, and no one speaks, really, for the rest of the meal.

Shiro remembers the trauma. Parts of it. He remembers hunger and fear and the trembling weakness in his legs when he tried to stand for the first time (during his escape). He remembers all of that, in stunning detail. The emotions associated with each event are clear and crisp in the forefront of his thoughts. He doesn’t understand why his mind wouldn’t block those memories, if it was trying to help him. (His memories are fine).

#

He can’t feel things properly. He does not refer to things like pain, obviously. Or thirst. Or hunger. All of those things seem to be functioning perfectly.

Its other things. He doesn’t remember what it feels like to laugh. Or how he felt when he woke up back on Earth. He doesn’t feel frustrated when Lance and Keith argue, though he knows, somehow, that he should. He doesn’t look at Pidge and fight a drowning surge of pride mixed with guilt. But he knows he should. He doesn’t look forward to the soothing murmur of Hunk’s voice. He knows he should. (So pretend).

He pretends, mostly, that he does. It isn’t all that hard. He can remember, clearly, the way he used to feel—or, at least, the way he thinks he used to feel—it’s… confusing. It’s just a side-effect of his captivity, of whatever the Galra did to him. He is sure it will go away. Just like that strange, buzzing headache that keeps coming back, grinding in his temples, digging in like a drill. So he pretends, waiting until such a time as it passes.

It is exhausting.

It drives him towards Allura.

She is the only one who does not require constant thought regarding how he should act and respond. He looks at her starlight eyes, her mouth, the curve of her spine, and he does not have to chase the shadow of what he used to know. She is strong, clever, beautiful. She is all the things he remembers. And she is more.

Exhaustion etches itself into her expression (she is wearing out even the legendary reserves of the Alteans). It is his fault. He fails to pull his weight, to take his place as one of the pilots, leaving her to serve as Paladin and to move them around space on the City. All he does is eat their food, take up a berth, and disturb them.

#

Shiro disturbs Allura one night on the bridge. He’d gone there to find her, she was there more often than not. He doesn’t have a purpose to the visit, not besides bringing her a cup of tea because he likes being around her, he likes feeling the way he knows he’s supposed to feel. She jumps when he touches her shoulder, though he remembers holding her hand, he remembers smiling down at her, he remembers screaming her name when he thought Zarkon had—

“Sorry,” he says, removing his hand. Things are not the same, now. He isn’t the Paladin of the Black Lion, the head of Voltron. He is just a burden, moving around the Castle like a shadow of what he should be.

She snorts a laugh and waves a hand. “Don’t be,” she says, closing her eyes for a moment and rubbing at her temples. Her work remains before her, the star-charts vibrant in the air around them, annotated with plans and myriad pieces of intel. He stares at it, eyes tracking from one side to the other (interesting). “I could use a break.”

He hums, tearing his attention away from the stars—it’s not like he’s going to have much of a role in whatever missions she’s planning, anyway—and offers out the tea. She takes it with a sweet flush and murmurs, “Oh, thank you. You didn’t have to…” She trails off, sipping at the drink and making a pleased sound.

He watches her drink, steam wreathing around her face, emotions and memory in synch with one another in a moment that relieves some of the terrible tightness in his chest, and he is so grateful for her, in ways he cannot express (because then they would know, all of them would know, about the ways he is off). “Is it okay?” he asks. It’s been awhile since he made it, after all. He can’t remember specifically preparing it before, but he must have.

He wanted to.

“Mm, it’s perfect,” she says, looking up at him, her eyes brighter than any of the stars surrounding them. She gazes up and her expression dims, her mouth tightens, she starts to reach out, hesitates, and then touches his arm. “How are you doing?” she asks.

Her skin is warm (unnatural). His head hurts, abruptly, the headache roaring to life like a summer thunderstorm. He pushes it down, ignores it, or at least tries to. He remembers being good at working through pain, but it’s hard to remember how. “I’m alright,” he lies, because he doesn’t know how to explain the alternative. “Happy to be back.”

“We’re happy to have you,” she says, smiling again, squeezing his arm, just a little.

He sighs, rubbing at the back of his neck. The hair there feels too long. He cut it wrong. “I know I’m not…” He gestures around the bridge, at himself. “I know it must be a disappointment. I must be--”

“Shiro.” She cuts him off, the frown back on her face, her brows pulled together. She draws up taller, her fingers tighten. “Don’t be ridiculous. Do you think we only wanted you back so you could pilot your Lion? You’re our friend,” she says, and her expression softens again, going warm and gentle and he needs the way it makes him feel, the way it eases the throb of his headache. 

“Allura,” he murmurs, trying to convey some of that, all of that, and not sure where even to start. (Kiss her).

He leans closer without thought, his hand brushing her jaw, he watches her eyes go incredibly wide in the ticks before he busses a kiss across her mouth. She exhales, shaky, ragged, breath curling against his skin. Her fingers spasm on his arm. For a moment, she seems poised to flee, and then she shivers, and her eyes drift half-closed, and she sways, just slightly, into him.

She kisses him properly, and she says, “Oh,” afterwards, soft and awed, and he curls an arm around her waist and quiets the noise in his head. (Good, good).

#

He spends a lot of time reading the City’s databases. He doesn’t know why, really. They aren’t especially interesting to him, or they didn’t used to be. He doesn’t really care about the exact mechanism used to run the City’s shields. (They are useful).

Pidge seems to enjoy his new interest, in any case. She is happy to offer advice and instruction when he can’t quite grasp a concept intuitively. She guides him through systems, pushing her glasses up her nose and hunching over her crossed legs, and he knows he should feel fondness for her. He remembers he should, but. But his head throbs and aches and he doesn’t understand how she can’t see that something is—(She is very useful).

#

Battles keep going badly for them. Lotor thwarts plans that he shouldn’t even know are coming. He anticipates carefully considered strategies and decimates them, forcing the team to wing-it constantly, to struggle for each victory, succeeding through increasingly narrow margins each time.

It takes a toll. The Lions sit in their bays, the marks on their skins not yet faded by the time they are called to battle once more. And the Paladins come back exhausted, stumbling, injured.

Allura hisses when Shiro lifts her helmet away, her tremendous mass of hair carefully pinned back, away from the bruise that covers half of her face. Shiro had been forced to watch as she and the Blue Lion were batted into the unforgiving bulk of a planet, earlier. As she struggled to rise, and Hunk moved to block the attack intended to take advantage of her situation. Hunk should have made it in time. But one of Lotor’s lieutenants had just been there, in his way, cutting away from the rest of the battle for no reason and—

“I’m fine,” Allura says, smiling up at him, lopsided. “Just a bruise.” She says it like he can’t see the way she curls her arm around her ribs, or the way Hunk is limping, or the way Lance is just sitting in front of Red, bent over with his head between his legs.

“Something is wrong,” Shiro blurts, the words out before he even has time to think them through. Something is wrong, inside of him, something is—

He groans, bending at the waist, ribbons of pain threading through his gray matter, turning all of his thoughts to white flame. He tastes bitter liquid in his mouth. Purple-ish fluid swims in front of his eyes. 

“Shiro! Shiro, can you hear me?” Allura. That’s Allura. Shiro cracks his eyes open. He is staring at the floor. The metal is hard under his knees. Allura is cradling the back of his head, pressed close against his side. He nods. He can nod, at least. “Are you alright?” she demands, her voice hoarse.

He tries to think that through. His mind is busy with noise. (Everything is fine).

“I’m fine,” he says. “Everything is fine.”

#

One quintant, Lance turns in his chair on the bridge and leers at Allura, and Shiro scowls, irritation and frustration blossoming through his thoughts, followed by a swift rush of relief. He remembers feeling this, before. It matches, it is another emotion that matches, and for a moment he can barely breathe from the joy of it.

Things are coming back. Emotions. They just took a while, that’s all. Maybe he isn’t as screwed up as he thought. He leans back in his chair and takes deep, slow breathes, nursing the flame of precious aggravation.

Other feelings return, too. He feels pride, watching the others pilot Voltron, watching each hard-won victory. (Those won’t last). He worries when they take a hit. Coran amuses him and saddens him at the same time. He re-learns how much he’d enjoyed Hunk’s company. 

Keith remains a strange blank, which seems wrong, somehow. Of all of the others, save Allura, he remembers caring for Keith. They had a history, a connection stretching back for so long, full of complexity, built on losses and struggle. 

Shiro can’t seem to feel any of that, anymore. He goes over all of his memories of Keith and it is like watching a movie, where he can understand why things happened, but can’t quite experience the feelings associated with them.

Sometimes Keith looks at Shiro like he can tell. Like he knows that something is off. Once, Shiro catches him staring, his eyes sharp and his mouth set in a grave scowl. (Avoid him). And he doesn’t see Keith very much, after that. It’s a big castle. There’s plenty of room for them both.

#

Lotor infiltrates the ship. It shouldn’t be possible, but he cuts right through their shields in the aftermath of a battle, he aims right for a weak spot and, before anyone can stop him, he is aboard. Shiro and Coran are on the bridge, the only ones, and Shiro knows he should be able to find the extra life-sign, he stares at the scanners and knows it’s there, but he can’t—he can’t—(There is nothing to see).

He squeezes his eyes shut, listening to the Paladins yell over the radio, crying out for guidance. He knows he can see the life-sign. His head throbs. Something hot and salty tickles down the back of his throat. He opens his eyes and looks at the scanners, his vision swimming, like he’s looking through a heat mirage.

There is a life-sign, wobbling, blinking in and out, in the crew-quarters. 

In Allura’s room. No.

Shiro stumbles back, his throat squeezed shut against any words, his head burning, burning away his thoughts. (Stop. Stop. STOP.)

He forces each step. It feels like trying to move through cement, he doesn’t understand what is going on, but he can’t give in to it. He drags himself forward, vaguely aware of Coran talking over his headset, finally informing the others of what Shiro could not.

It doesn’t matter. Shiro is closer than anyone else. Maybe he has remembered how to deal with pain, too, how to ignore it and work through it. He sways and stumbles and runs, when he can, and half-falls into the hall outside of Allura’s room.

For a moment, he swears the hall is empty, but the door is open. He hears footsteps. He closes his eyes, fighting down nausea and agony, his hand scrambling at the wall in an attempt to stay upright. Lotor blinks in and out, in the hallway, when Shiro looks again. He is tall and his smile is cruel. He is dragging Allura with a hand in the back of her collar. She is limp, like a ragdoll, her head hanging to one side. There is red in her hair, where it falls to cover her face. One of her hands is open on the floor, almost beseeching.

“Let her go,” Shiro gasps, the words costing him. He forces another step towards them, ignoring the wetness he can feel under his nose, down the sides of his neck. (STOP).

Lotor does not listen, but he does cock his head to the side. He says, “You are magnificent. No one will believe me when I tell them what you managed to do.”

There is a smear of blood, a trail, leading up to Allura’s feet. Shiro stares at that. It’s easier than looking at Lotor, which makes his eyes water and stabs knives into his temples. “Stop,” he says, or tries to say. It comes out garbled, a slur of consonants and vowels. (He should sit down and close his eyes).

The ground feels good. He falls forward. The world hurts. He can’t remember what he was doing. There is a sound, somewhere. Something being dragged. Allura.

He lifts his head and his vision swims, it is covered in a film of purple-pink. He can’t stand. His hand finds the blaster at his hip, though, and he pulls it, aims it unsteadily and stares at the mirage in front of him. “Put that down,” Lotor orders, all hints of amusement gone from his face. “This farce has gone on long enough. Let me pass now.” (Obey).

Shiro wavers. Sways. Shakes his head and then can’t stop. He won’t move. But neither can he seem to pull the trigger. His hand is trembling. Lotor scoffs and steps towards him, and then jerks to the side, just as Keith charges in, his bayard a glowing knife. Lotor yanks Allura up, like a shield, and Shiro gags, frozen in place by the agony in his skull. (Shoot the Red Paladin. Protect Lotor).

The world blurs to flashes of color and pain. He hears voices, but does not understand. He falls forward, barely getting a hand on the floor. The hall spins. There is a meaty thunk, and he manages to look up, to find Allura collapsed against a wall, limbs akimbo, her hair spread around her head like a splatter-pattern. (PROTECT LOTOR).

He crawls towards her. It happens without thought. Someone bumps into him. Someone yells. The rest of the world seems so busy. He just keeps moving, until he can touch her hair, her shoulder. And his mind goes quiet, all at once. He pulls her off the ground, against his chest, and holds her, holds her tight, confused about where the red dripping onto her armor is coming from. The ceiling is bleeding. It must be.

He leans his head back against the wall, dizzy, panting. His head hurts, but the pain is lessening. Allura’s face is pressed up against his neck. He can feel her breathing. He closes his eyes. Just for a while.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that schedule I posted last time? A lie, obviously. I'm an impatient person, blargh.

“Hey, I said wake up!”

Shiro jerks, confused, achy. He doesn’t remember where he is, but the lights are too bright. Something smells like blood. There is a weight on his chest and it is—Allura. He is holding Allura. She squirms a little bit, and he tightens his grip automatically because he remembers, he remembers Lotor dragging her along and he can’t lose her. He won’t. He’s never been willing to.

“Stop it, Keith,” Allura says. “Shiro, can you hear me?”

“Yes.” His voice sounds like a stranger’s, raw and shredded. He licks his teeth. His mouth tastes like blood. He blinks and takes in the hall. The others are gathered around them, Keith in the front, his bayard glowing around his hand, his expression wooden. Lance stands by his shoulder, looking unsure; Pidge and Hunk flank them, weapons in hand if not raised. “What’s… going on?”

“I think maybe we should be asking you that,” Lance says, shifting his weight from foot to foot. “Like, what the quiznak, man?”

“Let Allura go,” Keith says, flat. Shiro reflexively pulls her closer. His right arm is dead weight against his side, radiating cold through his uniform. He can’t trust an order. Not right now. Not even with the newfound quiet in his head.

“Everyone stop,” Allura says, firm. “He can’t hurt me.” And there is a relief in knowing that, in knowing that if Allura really didn’t want to be here, with his working arm around her, she wouldn’t be. She’d shove him off and walk away. “Shiro, do you know what’s going on?” The surety of that allows him to release his grip. She doesn’t dart away.

He raises his functional hand and rubs at the itchy wetness below his ears. His fingers come away tacky with blood. The pain in his head is still fading and there is quiet around his thoughts. He had not realized how noisy it was in his skull, until it went quiet; it makes it easier for him to think. He goes over the time since his escape, rubbing his fingers together. He says, “I think I have an idea.”

#

They take him to the infirmary, where Pidge spots a strange pattern running down the right side of his face and neck. It stretches around the back of his skull and up under his hair. It continues under his shirt, over his shoulder, down to his heavy Galra arm. She calls the marks Lichtenberg figures. They look kind of like ferns, or the lines of his nerves, printed on top of his skin. They are black and tender to the touch.

“So, what,” Hunk says, standing over to one side, tugging at his bandana and conferring with Lance, “he was Manchurian candidate-ing us this whole time? Is that what we think happened?”

“Man, I guess?” Lance keeps staring. Shiro doesn’t mind. If he could be outside his body, he’d be staring, too.

“How do we know they’re not still controlling him?” Keith asks Coran. He hasn’t said anything directly to Shiro since they arrived in the infirmary. His arms are crossed; his jaw keeps jumping. 

“He did stop Lotor from taking the princess,” Coran says, fingers flying over the controls as he runs some other scan or test. 

Shiro looks away from them. He doesn’t want to see the bright map of his brain. He finds Allura nearby, standing with her hands folded, her gaze unfocused and her expression carefully blank. He wants to reach out to her, but it doesn’t seem like the right time. He hesitates, and there is no voice in the back of his skull to push him past the hesitation.

He shudders and closes his eyes, only to snap them open when Coran makes a soft noise of shock. “What is it?” Allura demands, shaken from wherever her thoughts had carried her. Coran pushes the display on his screen down, looking jerkily around the room, at all the Paladins. The clustered information means nothing to Shiro, but it prompts a startled gasp from Pidge.

“Those markers,” she starts, shouldering her way past Lance, before Coran grabs at her hands and shushes her, his gaze cutting obviously towards Shiro.

“What is it?” Shiro asks, tired to his bones, having trouble sitting up straight, weighed down by the arm attached to his shoulder. Coran and Pidge both stare at him, their color lost, their eyes full of something dreadful. He wonders what they’ve found that could possibly be worse than the fact that the Galra have been controlling his actions for… who knows how long. “Please,” he says. “Just tell me. I want to know.”

Coran twists his hands together. He says, “Perhaps everyone else could step outside…?”

Shiro shudders. It must be horrible, this news they don’t want to share. He shakes his head. “No. No secrets. Just tell us.”

Coran looks over his head, at Allura. Shiro sees her nod, slowly, out of the corner of his eye. Coran slumps, his tired eyes droop lower. He turns back to the screen and waves a hand, calling up dancing blue and green lines and scrolling Altean text. Shiro can read it, he realizes, which seems odd, though the terms still don’t really make sense.

“This is your genetic code,” Coran says, like he’s warning Shiro about an oncoming blow. “The medical system flagged it when we scanned you.”

Pidge has not blinked since she caught sight of the screen. Shiro shivers. He says, “Why, Coran?” His voice comes out strained, and a hand comes to rest on his shoulder, cool and slim—Allura. Her touch jolts through him, grounding him, and he leans into it, unthinking.

He is leaning on her, still, when Coran finally screws his mouth up and says, “Because it shows indications of a cloning process.”

#

“Cloning?” Lance demands, his voice gone high, the way it does when he’s thrown completely out of his depth. He does not seem to be yelling at anyone in particular, but he has been repeating the question at increasingly loud levels for some time.

“Why didn’t you catch this before?” Keith snaps, glaring up at Coran, his hand hovering around his bayard, though he has not yet drawn it. “You had it in here when we found it. Why didn’t your scans notice this then?”

Coran grimaces, waving his hands at the screen. “Technology has changed in ten-thousand years,” he says, “the scans did note something strange, but it took a smidge for the algorithms to determine what was going on.”

Pidge and Hunk are discussing something amongst themselves, their heads bent close and hands flying everywhere. Shiro cannot hear them. Everything seems to be overridden with a faint hum. His heart races in his chest. His bones shake. He leans forward, struggling to take a gasping breath, and Allura’s hand slides down, squeezes. She says, “This isn’t important right now. Can we tell if the Galra’s control over him has been broken?”

“I—” Coran breaks off in the middle of some kind of rebuttal towards Keith. He blinks over at them and his expression crumples. Shiro turns his face away, hating the expression he can feel on it. “I can’t be one-hundred percent sure, of course, but it appears that the control was associated with the pathways connecting the arm to his mind and they…” He gestures at the burned marks across Shiro’s skin.

“There could be other ways for them to control it that we don’t know about,” Keith says, boiling over with anger in a way that Shiro does not remember—that he wasn’t given memories about, maybe. “In its head. Or in the arm, we don’t—”

“I want it off,” Shiro interrupts, before he has to hear Keith call him ‘it’ again. Keith’s anger stings. It is not what they are supposed to be to one another. Allura’s fingers tighten around his arm. She has come around the bed and her hip presses against his leg. He wants to touch her, but he doesn’t… He doesn’t know if he should. He’s a clone. He’s not the real Shiro. He shakes his head and looks up. “The arm. Take it off.”

That gets them all to be quiet, at least for a moment. They stare, instead of speaking. Pidge finds her voice first. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

“It doesn’t work anymore anyway,” Shiro says. It is limp and heavy, dragging at his shoulder. “And Keith is right. We don’t know what’s inside it. Take it off.”

Coran squirms. “Perhaps we should think--”

“Get it off of me,” Shiro grinds out, the demand tearing out of his throat. His good hand clenches around the edge of the bed. It takes more control than he knew he had not to yell. He will have to thank the real Shiro for that, someday, if they ever meet.

Coran blanches. His eyes jerk up, over to Allura, who orders, “Do as Shiro says.”

And Shiro shivers, familiar, comforting emotion briefly overwhelming the dread and confusion in his chest.

#

They take the arm. First, they argue about how it will be done, and when, and by whom. And then they cover him in cool Altean sheets and they knock him out. His last sight is Allura, standing near his head, talking grimly to Coran. He wonders, before blackness takes him under, if they will just never wake him up. Certainly, that would be easier for them.

Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad way to go.

He wakes up, groggy and with a dry mouth, in a clean room with light streaming down around him. Someone says something, but his thoughts are muzzy. He groans, and someone shifts. A hand lifts off of his, leaving behind cold. “Here,” Allura says. “Drink this.”

‘This’ is a cup of water. Shiro blinks at her, obediently sits up, and drinks it. The haze of the anesthesia wears off quickly. He recognizes the infirmary, now. He remembers, in a rush, why he is there, waking up. He knows, before he looks, that the arm is gone. There is no more weight. He stiffens anyway, glancing down carefully, bracing for it.

His right arm ends in nothingness, a few inches below his shoulder. The empty space is shocking. Looking for a part of his body and finding it missing makes his stomach jerk to one side, roiling. “The surgery went well,” Allura says, quiet. She is sitting by his bed. He wonders why. Surely, now that she knows what he is, surely whatever they had is…

Well. It was never his to begin with. It belonged to someone else with his face and his name. He just stole it for a while.

“We found no further traces of Galra technology in your body, and…” She stops speaking when he wheezes a single, weak laugh. He can’t bring himself to look directly at her, but he sees her hand, curled around the railing on his bed, tighten.

“I am Galra technology,” he points out.

Metal bends under her hand. She says, “Shiro,” softly, and whatever else she would have said is lost, because the infirmary doors spring open, allowing Coran, Pidge, and Hunk to rush through.

“You’re up!” Pidge says, with all evidence of pleasure about that fact. She smiles at him and tells him, “Hunk only threw up twice during the surgery.”

#

They release him from the infirmary, later that day, under a guard. No one says this is the case, but Lance has no other reason to follow him down the hall. He finds it comforting. His head wasn’t his own for so long, he likes the idea that someone will be there if he loses control of his mind, or anything else, again. They can say that there’s no more Galra influence in him, but who knows what they built into him, really?

Lance takes him to his quarters. To the real Shiro’s quarters, where he has been living. Lance follows him inside, chattering about something inane while Shiro stares at things he thought were his. At least he knows, now, why he couldn’t cut his hair properly. He’d never done it before.

“Hello,” Allura says, from the doorway. She shifts her weight from foot to foot. Her hands are flexing by her side. She’d disappeared while they were running a few last checks on Shiro, to make sure all his electrolyte levels were correct, according to Coran. Pidge claimed she left to shower. Her hair does look damp. There are dark circles under her eyes that weren’t there when they took Shiro into surgery.

Lance looks between them a few times, and his expression does something complicated before he sighs and rolls his eyes. “I just remembered,” he says, “that I have to be somewhere. Doing something. With, uh, someone. So.” He sidles towards the door and then past Allura, wiggling his fingers over her head in a strange goodbye. “Later.” And then he is gone.

Allura steps into the room and shuts the door. Shiro’s chest aches, just looking at her, so he looks away. He says, as calmly and steadily as he can, “Princess. Did you need something?”

She sucks in a breath as though stung. Her hands twist together, fingers knotting up. “I…” She trails off. There is half a room of space between them. It feels like more. She takes a breath that sounds shaky. He jerks his head up to stare at her, looking at her properly for the first time since Lotor’s unwelcome intrusion into their lives. “Was it—were we just—did they make you?” She looks up, her eyes bright and wet. “Did they make you… care for me, then?”

She looks like she did when she sacrificed the last remnants of her father to save them all. Shiro can only stare for a moment, and she flinches, nods, and starts to turn.

“No,” he manages to say, finally, and she freezes to a stop. “No. Princess, you’re the only…” He trails off, unsure how to explain any of the confusion between emotions and implanted memories that he had suffered through for so long.

She glances up at him, cocking her head to one side. “The only what?”

He shifts, discomfort crawling under his skin. He wishes he hadn’t said anything. He wishes they didn’t have to do this. He knows how it all ends. It already ended. But he can’t find a way past it, so he takes a breath and soldiers on. “The only thing that makes sense. Even when you found me. I knew the way I was supposed… to feel. About all of you. But. But nothing matched. At first. Except.” He cuts off the words. He’s just rambling anyway, and they’re beside the point. He says, “No. They didn’t make me… feel the way I do. About you.”

It is strange to think about it, now that he knows the truth. He’d taken one look at her and fallen in love. The real Shiro must have done the same thing. It explained why his stolen memories and emotions clicked with her, while they failed to do the same with everyone else.

She blinks, taking a hesitant step towards him. He stiffens, and she draws to a stop, her expression tightening with confusion. “Then why…?” She gestures between them, at the distance.

He shrugs. It’s obvious. He doesn’t know why she’s making him say it. “I’m just a clone,” he explains, the words heavy on his tongue and in his heart. “I’m not the real Shiro.” He shrugs again. It feels strange, lopsided. “You deserve…”

He trails off when she walks towards him, his tongue tangling into a knot when she comes to a stop close enough that he can feel the heat of her body. Her eyes are soft when she reaches out and, giving him ample time to move away, touches the side of his face, where the Lichtenberg figures reveal the full extent of the Galra’s hold over him.

“The other Shiro did not do this for me,” she says, quiet. Her fingers trace over the marks, down to the hinge of his jaw, over the pound of his pulse in his neck. He shivers, her touch always does that, and his hand comes up of its own accord, brushing her side. “The other Shiro never kissed me.”

He asks, dizzy, suddenly, “Allura?”

She smiles at her name, and it punches the breath from his chest. Her hand curves around the back of his neck, warm and soft and strong. She leans closer, and he stops her, hating himself for doing it. “He loves you,” he tells her, because maybe she does not understand. “The real Shiro. I have his memories. And he—he loves you.”

She does not break their gaze. Her eyes are brighter than every star he has ever seen. After a moment she shakes her head, just a little. “And you?” she asks. 

The question seems terribly unfair and pointless. Surely, she knows. How could she not? He looks to the side, and admits, “Of course I do.”

She makes a soft, gutted sound, and her other hand cups his cheek, turning his face back. She pushes up onto her toes and kisses him softly on the mouth. “What…?” he manages, startled. He blurts, “Allura, the real me… he’s out there, somewhere, still. And he’s not some Galra copy. You can have—”

“I have who I want right here,” she says, the words soft, but powerful enough that they shake him, filling up the inside of his skin, so sweet and good that he thinks, for a moment, that he must have imagined them. He pulls her closer, needing everything she’s offering, and she leans into the kiss, seemingly undaunted by the intensity of it.

He tries to check himself, after a moment, pulling back just far enough to pant against her mouth. Her cheeks are flushed and he wishes he had another hand to bury in her hair, he wishes he was whole and real and that the universe was sane. He wants to drown in her and forget everything else, at least for a while. “Allura?” he murmurs, not sure what he’s asking her for, but needing it desperately.

“Yes,” she says, and she pulls him back a step, and another, until they bump into the side of his bed. She tumbles them down, rolling him onto his back and stretching over him, her hair falling around them both when she leans over to kiss him once more. He reaches for her with a hand he doesn’t have, and for a moment his chest tightens, before she drags him from the dark pull of his thoughts.

She leads. He doesn’t know what to do—isn’t sure if the real Shiro would have or not. If there are memories there, he can’t reach them. It doesn’t matter. The world dissolves to kisses, to hands, to bare skin and panted breathes. For the time they are together, nothing else matters at all. Afterwards, they curl together, her arms strong around him and her hair tangled about his shoulders and he closes his eyes.

His dreams are sweet, for once.


	3. Chapter 3

The peace doesn’t last. Not even for an entire night. Shiro dreams that he is drowning in liquid purple, his lungs rejecting the fluid as he tries to find the surface. His clumsy hands brush cool metal, the handles of the Black Lion. The liquid fills the inside of his helmet, and he claws at it, as outside the view-screen the Castle takes a direct hit and dissolves into light.

He screams, knowing in the terrible way that you know things in dreams, that Allura was in the Castle, along with all the others. She is stardust, now. Liquid does not flood down his throat as he screams. He sucks in sour air, instead. Colds creeps over his skin. His hair hangs heavy down the sides of his face, over his neck. His breath fogs in front of his face and his stomach cramps on nothing and—

No.

No, he can’t be back in this tomb of a ship. He can’t. He lurches up to his feet, but his legs are too weak to hold him and they dump him to the floor. He tries to call out for someone, but his throat is too dry. They found him. He knows that. They found him, they brought him back, but what if that was all a hallucination, a last mercy from his dying mind, what if he has been floating in black the entire time.

He is standing by the view-screen, then, with no movement or time in between. Stars stretch endlessly before him, distant bright points of light that wink out, one after another, until there is nothing but darkness, darkness and cold and Shiro, alone in the entirety of the universe, and—

“Shiro!” Allura shakes him, hard. Her hands are burning hot after the cold of the dream. He gasps, gulping at air that smells like her skin. The room is dark, save for the soft luminescence of the markings on her cheeks, her shoulders, her back, and her hips. “Sh, sh, it’s just a dream.”

He sits, still panting, the dream curling around his ribs like a vice and squeezing. Slow breaths, that’s what he needs. Slow and even. The other Shiro learned how to breathe through dreams like this. Shiro uses that stolen knowledge, holding still and steady until his heartrate slows enough for him to discern individual beats.

“Shiro?” Allura asks, perhaps sensing the shift in his breathing. Her hand is warm between his shoulder blades. Her hair, loose, brushes his thigh. “What…? Do you want…?”

He leans into her, sideways. Her skin is soft. Two curves of pink nearly meet over her collarbone. “I was back in the ship,” he says, and his voice is a rasp. He wonders if he screamed out loud. He shudders. “Where you found me. Before. I was alone. Dying.”

She makes a hurt sound. Her arms curl around him, dragging him closer. “You’re not alone now,” she says. “You’re not dying.”

He listens to her heart beating. It’s going nearly as fast as his, faster even than normal for the Alteans. “I don’t want to die alone,” he admits, against the safety of her skin. She stiffens.

“You won’t,” she says, orders. “You’re not going to die. It was just a dream.”

He hums. It felt too close to be a dream, but he knows she is right. The feelings will fade. By morning they will be small enough to bury. He remembers this. The real Shiro knew it well. “Come here,” she says, pulling him back, towards the head of the bed. “It’s still very early. We should try to get some more sleep.”

He goes willingly under her hands. There is little he would not do, if she asked it of him, so he settles back on a pillow damp with his sweat or tears and only shivers a little when she curls against his back, her arm thrown over his chest. He traces her knuckles and the pale line of color that curls from her wrist up towards her elbow. He says, the thought that’s been haunting him since she kissed him earlier, “I thought you would be angry.”

She tightens her hold. “Angry?”

“Mm. About… what I am. I thought.” He shrugs. It doesn’t make any sense to him, her decision. Her acceptance. He’d thought he needed it too much to question, but apparently not.

She rubs her face against his shoulder. Her voice is tired and pained when she finally says, “I—no. Maybe I would have been. Once. But I now know the value of judging someone based on what they do, not what they are. And…” She trails off. For a moment, he thinks she will keep the rest of her thoughts buried behind her teeth, but then she threads their fingers together and rallies. “And I can’t lose anyone else. I can’t, Shiro.” Her voice cracks. He feels her shake. “Not for any reason.”

He rolls them and holds her, awkward with only one arm. “Sh,” he says, mimicking her. They hold onto one another like two people drowning, in danger of dragging one another down. “You won’t,” he promises, offering more than he should, more than is wise. “I’m not going anywhere.”

She nods. Her arms are around him, and he feels the immensity of her strength, just for a tick, when she tightens her grip, as though she intends to keep him around with sheer brute force. “Good,” she says, wetly. “Good.”

He kisses the top of her head. It is early, but they don’t fall back to sleep.

#

Shiro’s head stays quiet, of outside thoughts, anyway. He has plenty to dwell on all by himself. Still. The headaches disappear. He loses the desire to go through Castle schematics. He had not realized how strangely he was acting before. Two quintants after they take the Galra arm, Pidge pauses in the middle of her dinner, narrows her eyes at him, and says, “You’re looking better.”

He nods acknowledgment. They’ve all been telling him that, except for Keith, who stares at him like he might bite at any moment. Too many people have left Keith down, or just left him. He’s never trusted easily; Shiro’s stolen knowledge allows him to understand that much, at least.

He knows he needs to do something about it, the tension between them, but he has no real opportunity until he runs into Keith one evening, both of them on their way to the training rooms. Keith grimaces and then hides the expression, poorly, before saying, “I can come back later.”

“There’s enough for both of us to do,” Shiro says, holding the door open, waiting. He thinks the odds are even that Keith will scoff and walk away, but after a moment he nods jerkily, instead, and stalks into the room. Shiro watches him pick up a practice weapon and says, “We could spar.”

Keith looks at him, brows up and disbelief on his face before his expression freezes shut again. He says, “But you’re… I mean. You don’t have. You know.” He gestures, helplessly, at the space where Shiro’s arm used to be.

Shiro shrugs, ignoring the sting of what the Galra took from him, or never gave him to begin with, or whatever. It’s a complicated mess. “I still need to know how to fight.” Shiro is strong, but not as strong as he remembers being, and the weakness is not just from his missing arm. His muscles think they should be able to do things they’ve never done, not really. He needs to relearn the scramble and flow of battle. He needs to be useful.

Keith stares at him, eyes flat and hard, unreadable. “Sure,” he says, finally. “Why not?” And he tosses the practice weapon aside, brings his hands up, and steps forward. It is strange, sparring with him. Shiro knows without knowing how he will attack—Keith is fast and aggressive, has always been fast and aggressive.

But he’s also, Shiro realizes, catching a blow against his ribs that is all knuckles, aiming to hurt. That’s new, or at least unfamiliar to the real Shiro. Keith used to be careful with him.

It is a fortunate thing that Shiro has figured out how to deal with pain. He shrugs off the blow, looking across at the banked fire in Keith’s eyes and wondering, briefly, if he made a mistake. It’s too late to do anything about it now. They trade blows, back and forth, Shiro’s balance off and his stamina nowhere near where it should be. He manages to tag Keith a few times, even this constructed version of his body is strong and capable.

He is not expecting it when Keith yells and charges him bodily, shoving him back with both arms and shouting, “Stop it!”

Shiro blinks, panting to get his breath back. Keith has one arm drawn back, fist trembling, the punch trapped as unused potential. “Stop what?”

“Stop—stop holding back! I hate it when you—” His expression collapses, then, and he turns aside, fists clenched out of his side, an angry noise caught in his throat. Shiro stares at his back for a moment, uncomfortable, lost.

“Can we talk?” Shiro asks, finally, and Keith nods, after a moment, without turning.

“Sure,” he says. Shiro stares at him. He looks older than the other Shiro remembered. Older and tired. He is still wearing the uniform of the Red Paladin, and Shiro can’t decide what that means, if it means anything. Keith blows out a hard breath and snaps, “Well? Talk.”

“I’m sorry I’m not him,” Shiro says. They’re the words he’s been planning to say for quintants, to anyone who wanted to listen to them. Keith’s shoulders stiffen. “I am. I know how close you two were, and I know we can’t… have that.” There’s nothing to build on, from Shiro’s end, for one thing. “But I’d like us to be able to work together. I’m clean of Galra influence, both Coran and Allura—”

“I know that,” Keith snaps, dragging a hand back through his hair and scowling. “We all know that, we saw what you…” He trails off, pacing back and forth, his steps short and fast.

Shiro watches him. “So what is it, then? What’s bothering you?”

Keith comes to an abrupt stop, staring at the wall like he intends to set it on fire. He says, “You’re not him. Obviously. That means he’s still out there. It means I didn’t find him. The Galra might have him and we haven’t even been looking for so long, and…” Keith’s voice cracks and he turns his face to the side, his hands balling up into fists. “I let him down. In every way. He wanted me to be the leader and I let him down, I let the Galra fool me, and I let you—” His jaw clicks shut.

Shiro stares at the side of his head. He says, “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Keith’s voice is tired, sharp-edged. He snorts. “Oh.” And he shakes his head and stalks from the room. Shiro lets him go. It doesn’t seem productive to make him stay.

#

The others don’t seem as angry. Pidge is, Shiro thinks, tickled by the prospect of cloning. Hunk is just happy to have some version of a missing piece back, even if it isn’t quite right. Shiro thinks they’ve both decided, privately, that if the Galra sent them a clone that the real Shiro is probably dead. They are willing to settle.

Allura is… 

Is the rock he builds his sanity on. He tries not to look too closely at why she strokes his hair, or kisses his mouth, or holds him close. He fears it will dissolve like fog under the heat of the sun, if he does. He asks her only once, what she thinks will happen when they find the real Shiro.

Her expression, before she has time to master it, is resigned and sad. And he understands, then, that she thinks the real Shiro is dead, too. “We’ll figure it out when we need to,” she says, and he leaves the conversation alone.

#

They have a few quintants of quiet. No doubt Lotor is off somewhere, digging into everything that has happened and coming up with some foul new strategy. They take the down time to recover and to run more tests on Shiro. He submits to them willingly. The last thing he wants is to be turned against the others. Again.

It doesn’t leave him a lot of time, and so it is not until four quintants later that Shiro happens to walk by the Black Lion, on his way to help Pidge with some adjustment she’s making to a shuttle; she’s gotten the idea that he enjoys that kind of work from his time under Galra control, and he doesn’t have it in him to tell her that he actually doesn’t care. He’s humming under his breath when the Lion shifts, making a deep noise.

Shiro freezes, not sure what to expect. He has avoided the Lions, in general, since he realized what he was. Before that, he spent too much time around them, studying them, he realizes now, too late. He wonders if they knew what was wrong with him the entire time. They must have. It explains so much.

“Hey, there,” he says, wondering if something is wrong with Keith. The Lions always seem to know when a Paladin is in danger. It’s the only time he—the real him—remembers them stirring on their own. 

The Black Lion’s eyes light up all of a sudden, startling in the dim room, and she shakes her head like she is waking up, turning to look at him and stretching.

She is so large, and he feels—oh.

He feels her in his mind. It is not like the pressure of the Galra influence, more a low thrum vibrating at a frequency that calls and calms him. He remembered this connection, but has never experienced it. He takes a step towards her, lifting his hand, and she purrs, moving her gigantic head, brushing against his touch.

He laughs, shakily, and she stands, walking in a circle around him for a moment before settling, lowering her head and opening her mouth.

He steps into the cockpit, familiar and unfamiliar all at the same time. The thrum of her presence in his head changes everything, painting the controls in new colors, whispering what they are into his thoughts. She is happy, he senses, happy and relieved that he is well now, that he is himself again. 

“I’m not him,” he tells her, even as she calls him to his chair. “Not really. I’m just a copy. They made me.” He swallows, hard. “To hurt you.”

She envelops him, then, her thoughts surrounding his, taking him somewhere far away from the hangar and the ship. “Oh,” he says, floating beside her in space, as they look down at a younger version of her body, in the middle of being constructed. “They made you, too, huh?”

Later, he steps out of the Lion to find the entire crew waiting for him, except for Keith. They are standing outside the shield she set up, wearing expressions of hope, or anxiety. She sits up at his back, the shield falling away, and Shiro says, “I guess she approves.”

Allura laughs and runs to him, and he realizes then that he is smiling, too relieved to be confused or unsure, at least for a moment. 

#

Shiro wants to spend a quintant, an entire movement, inside the Black Lion, but he restrains himself. He can work on the research he’s concerning himself with from the bridge, and it feels like… bad form, to spend too much time with the Lions. Besides, his head hurt after the first time Black connected with him and he had feared... well. The headache dissipated quickly.

“What are you working on?” Allura asks him, one evening in his quarters, after a quintant they spent convincing another world to rise up against the Empire. She is pulling her hair out of its tight bun, making a tiny sound of relief, and it distracts him, momentarily. 

“Something I thought might have been important,” he says, sighing. She makes a curious sound and leans over; her heavy hair brushes his cheek. She touches the screen he was working with and pushes until she can read it, her brow furrowing after a moment.

“None of us have visited the Auhr’reh’n sector,” she says, her gaze flicking up to meet his.

“I know. Which makes this pretty strange, right?” The reports he found while digging around, looking for some sign in the expanse of the universe of the real him, indicated that a giant Lion had been seen fighting Galra patrols in that area. 

Allura frowns, scrolling through the reports he’d found and coalited. “Indeed. Perhaps it is some new ploy of Lotor’s. He could be trying to draw us in, catch us off guard.”

Shiro sighs, he’d considered the same thing. “Mm. Or it could just be people telling stories. Trying to maintain some hope.”

Her frown deepens and she looks to the side. She says, “We should be doing more.” As though they are not constantly working on one project or another, reaching out to dozens of worlds and forming careful alliances, even if they have not been forced to the field of battle for a few quintants. 

“We will,” he says, and draws her close, enjoying the way her legs settle on either side of his hips, the taste of her mouth, the heavy brush of a curl of her hair across his cheek. She is better than he deserves, and he knows it, has known it since the first time she touched him, but, well. He will enjoy it while he can.

She pulls back, cocking her head to the side and asking, “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” he says, smiling, and she does not look convinced, so he kisses her again and again and again, until she is flushed and shivery, her fingers clenched in his hair, urging him on. He knows just what to do, now.

They have learned a lot about one another, recently. Things the real Shiro never knew, so at least he has that. 

#

Keith finds them, later, knocking on the door while Shiro is thinking about getting up to wash off. He is turning the Black Paladin’s bayard over and over in his hands in the hallway outside of Shiro’s room. “Take it,” he says, his expression wiped clean and his tone naked of any particular inflection.

Shiro glances back at Allura. Her hair is a tumbled mess. Keith does not seem surprised to find her with him. Shiro clears his throat. “I’m not sure I’m really… I mean. How would I even use it?” He tries to smile. It doesn’t fit quite right on his face. The relief from the Black Lion’s acceptance faded quickly, leaving behind echoing doubts.

He is not the same man the real Shiro is. He just has his memories. He’s just a substitute, one well made enough to confuse the Black Lion, that’s all. A placeholder, until they find the real thing, the version of him un-perverted by the Galra.

Keith just stares up at him. “I’m pretty sure that if she wants you to pilot her, she’ll find a way to make it work.” 

Shiro blanches. He remembers piloting her—or, the real him does—and he can feel the steady hum of the Lion in the back of his mind. But. “Keith—”

“Just take it.” Keith interrupts, the words tumbling out in a rush. “I don’t want it anyway. I never wanted it. You—he—thought I—but I miss piloting Red and I’m not—I’ll lead, as long as I need to, if I need to, but—I don’t. I don’t want this.” He looks down then, his jaw working, and shrugs, after a moment. He holds the bayard out.

Shiro reaches for it and hesitates. It is not just Keith he would be affecting, if he takes it. And he lacks complete conviction that he is ready. He—

He feels the Black Lion push him, all the way from the hangar bay, and his fingers close around the bayard. His skin tingles at the touch. A wave of shock flows across his nerves, and the weapon flexes in his hand, reshaping in a flash of blinding white.

When the light fades, when Shiro can see again, his hand is empty and his arm is—

Is back.

And glowing.

He stares down at the shimmering outline of his fingers and palm. It does not look mechanical. He can see the echoes of veins and tendons, picked out in starlight. He turns his hand over, numb, and asks, “What…?”

Allura touches his shoulder and then his arm, her fingers dark against the glowing surface. They do not sink in. She glides a touch over the turn of his elbow, towards the inside of his wrist. He stares at her face, looking for some clue about what is happening in her expression. “It’s the bayard,” she says, ghosting a touch across the center of his palm. He can feel her fingertips. He shivers and turns his hand, threading his fingers through hers and marveling at it. She laughs, a little, and says, “It tingles.”

Keith clears his throat. When Shiro looks up, he is standing there, looking small and alone. He says, “I guess that proves—” And he cuts off, his eyes going wide with shock as his head snaps towards the hangars. “Red,” he says, like that explains anything, and maybe it explains everything, before he takes off at a run.

Allura sways, and Shiro steadies her without thought. She lifts a hand to her head, a grimace twisting up her features, and he demands, “What’s going on? Are we under attack?” He is not completely confident he is ready for a battle.

She shakes her head, her expression clearing. “No.” She cocks her head to the side, eyes distant for a moment before she blinks, some of the tension that he had gotten used to seeing around her eyes disappearing. “No, I can’t feel my connection to the Blue Lion any longer.”

He winces. He has only felt this connection to the Black Lion for a little while, and already he finds the thought of losing it to be distressing. The thrum of it in the back of his skull fills up a space he had not realized was empty, the crater the Galra left behind. He feels better with it busy, as though the Lion’s presence will keep the Galra from creeping back in. He says, “I’m sorry.”

Allura blinks at him and then smiles. “It’s alright.” She shrugs her shoulders. “I enjoyed acting as a Paladin.” She frowns, just for a moment. “It felt right. But Blue was never mine. Not really.”

From down the hall, a door slides open, and Shiro hears Lance’s ebullient cry.

Allura snorts and leans against him. He curls his new arm around her, and wonders how long he can hold onto the life they seem content, mostly, with him stealing.


	4. Chapter 4

Lotor attacks that quintant, vargas later, before Shiro has a chance to even take Black on a test drive. He strikes with an entire fleet. Of course he does. He hits, not the City, but one of their allies. They receive a call for aid from Kolivan, they transmission cutting in and out even as he calmly requests their immediately assistance. 

The Black Lion calls to Shiro in the back of his head, ready for the fight, but he finds himself standing in front of her, wearing a uniform he has pulled on only once before. He can hear the others, chattering the way they do to settle their nerves, as Allura takes them through the wormhole into battle. He wonders what will happen if he crawls in, and the Lion looks inside him and realizes he is not the real Shiro, he wonders—

They exit the wormhole, and the first shots smack against the City’s shields immediately.

“Paladins,” Allura says, strain in her voice. “It seems we have another fleet incoming. The Castle’s shields—ah!”

The way his gut twists when she cries out is familiar from another life. He climbs into the Black Lion, all hesitations pushed to the side. “Hold on, Princess,” he says, reaching for the controls, sure, for an instant, that they will fall dark and unresponsive under his hands. The Black Lion hums beneath him, instead, her approval settling against his bones, almost forming words before they slip away, and she rises to stand. “We’re on our way.”

The fight is dream-like. His reflexes and instincts were downloaded into this brain, or whatever, not learned, but they function well enough. His Lion guides him through the rough spots where he flounders, this body not used to the demands of piloting a Lion, or of forming Voltron.

He thinks, when they first decide to form the great warrior, that it will not work. How could it work? He can feel, through the tenuous connection the Paladins share with one another and the Lions, the tight, dark ball of Keith’s emotions. The others radiate anxiety they are hiding relatively well. Surely, with all of that, they will not be able to complete the transformation…

But something clicks inside of Shiro’s chest, something tied up in the desire to protect the others, to stand against this threat no matter what, and he senses, through Black, the way that emotion tumbles through all of the others, like dominos knocked down in a line.

They form Voltron.

It’s something else. 

The real Shiro’s memories of the formation were nothing but sense-impressions. There was no way for him to understand it until he experienced it. The minds of the other Paladins shine brightly, reaching out and brushing his, their thoughts there and not there. He could not say what they are thinking, not with words, but there is a part of him that knows. He senses their arms and legs, their weapons; they hover on the edges of his thoughts, a thousand new things to focus on all at once.

It feels over the edge of being too much to handle and contain, as though if he tries to squeeze in the room to breathe everything will fly apart, scattered to the stars. 

But the other Shiro handled this. And that means he can handle this, unless the Galra failed, somehow, unless they missed some key component of his mind or body, unless it is tied to a soul he maybe doesn’t even have. Shiro’s gut twists and then there is something else, something outside of him, pushing that swell of anxiety down and away.

He recognizes the touch of another mind. The real Shiro was familiar with it. One of the other Paladins reaches for him and shores up the weakness in his mind. Through the touch, he feels anger and frustration and something else, buried deeper. It feels like Keith. The action is curt and practical; he can sense, through the connection, that it was done because it was necessary.

The vibration Shiro had not even noticed in the connection holding Voltron together subsides and then fades completely, and they stand, together, ready to face the threat.

Lotor came in force, and there is a recklessness to his strategy that Shiro does not remember him employing before. He does not strike so surgically as he once did. He does not seem to be ever one step ahead. He is not getting information fed to him from the inside of the Castle, Shiro realizes. What seemed like near-omnipotence was nothing but a trick, carried out with Shiro’s aid.

It brings bile into Shiro’s throat, and he swallows it down. He can’t afford the nausea.

The loss of his sleeper agent does not make Lotor less dangerous, really. It quickly becomes obvious that he is just dangerous in other ways, and he already has the information Shiro funneled to him. He begins ignoring the Blade of Mamoru station once Voltron appears, and hits the Castle hard, instead, in all the weak spots Shiro must have revealed. Both fleets seem content to ignore Voltron, sacrificing ships to keep them busy so the main force can focus on the Castle.

It is a new strategy for the Galra, who used to treat the Castle as an afterthought, their attention always turned to Voltron.

Shiro wishes the Galra would return to their old ways. As it is, he turns over strategies to regain the fleet’s attention as the Castle gets battered, the battle dragging on, testing their endurance. “Maybe if Allura wormholes away,” Pidge suggests, panting, just as the Castle’s shields fail in a flash of white light, Allura’s strained scream filtering through Shiro’s helmet.

They are so far away. Shiro sees weapons impact across the City, small explosions picking apart the great ship. He snarls, and they move as one, dragging their sword through a massive cruiser, cutting their way closer and closer to their goal. It doesn’t matter. 

They won’t get to the Castle quickly enough. That is obvious. They fell for Lotor’s plan, the plan he crafted with information he gleaned from Shiro, like idiots. Shiro yells, wordless, mad desperation and denial surging through him. Allura screams again and is cut off, abruptly.

And suddenly there is knowledge in Shiro’s head, the Black Lion placing it there easily, painlessly. For a moment, everything he must do is perfectly clear. 

He reaches for the bayard-port without hesitating, his glowing hand fitting neatly inside and—

And the rest is a blur. The others cry out, startled. Hunk makes a sound that might indicate his stomach took poorly to the sudden burst of speed. “Get ready,” Shiro orders, even as his own stomach settles. He turns them in the space between the Castle and Lotor’s flagship, where they suddenly just _are_ , moving from one side of the battlefield to the other in a blink. They bring up their shield just in time to catch a tremendous blast.

“What just happened?” Pidge demands. She sounds queasy. “Did we go through those ships?”

“Forget that,” Lance says, apparently discarding their ability to slide through solid matter, a trick that Shiro is distantly sure the real Shiro pulled off, once, by himself, “do we have huge frigging wings now or am I just imagining things?”

“Focus, guys,” Keith says, his thoughts, felt in the strange connection they all share, locking back into the fight before anyone else’s. “Here they come.”

He’s not wrong. The Galra try to hit them with everything they have, but it’s hard to hit something moving as fast as they are. Piloting Voltron suddenly feels like riding lightning, they are there and gone, jumping from ship to ship, the rest of the universe fading to quiet in the heat of the battle. They buy the Castle enough time to regain its shields. They give the Blade enough space to rally and move to attack Lotor’s flank.

And Lotor flees, in the end. He limps off, the majority of the two fleets floating in pieces around the City.

Shiro breathes out, it feels like for the first time, and demands, “Allura? Coran? Is everything alright?”

“We’re fine, Shiro.” Allura’s voice is a balm he hadn’t realized he needed. He exhales, shaky with adrenaline, with the proof that he can fight against Lotor without freezing, with the reassurance that there is no longer a voice in the back of his head, manipulating him.

The shaking continues after Voltron separates. After they land. After the others climb from their Lions and disperse into the Castle, bouncing off one another and the walls, talking loudly to the representatives of the Blade who have boarded the Castle. Shiro curls his hands around the controls until the trembles aren’t visible and breathes and breathes and breathes.

“Hey, there,” Allura says, quietly. She lifts off his helmet, the way he used to do for her, when he was not himself, or was himself, maybe it is who he is now that is changed, and she smooths a hand back over his damp hair before pausing. She asks, “Shiro?”

He shakes his head. He doesn’t know what to say, or what is wrong with him. He feels almost nauseous with relief and the fading heat of battle. “Sh,” she says, and she reaches for his hands, coaxing his fingers off of the handles, making a surprised sound when he throws his arms around her and pulls her down, crushing her close, just for a minute, just for a while, he knows he shouldn’t.

“I thought we weren’t going to make it to you,” he says, strangled, against the long line of her neck, the words burning in his throat. The real Shiro knew how to fly Black. He had a real connection, they were like one being in a way Shiro vaguely remembers, but knows that he has not accessed. The real Shiro should have been piloting Black, protecting Allura, not… not him. “What if I’d been too late? What if—”

“You made it,” she says. Her cheek rests against the side of his head. “I knew you would.”

He shakes his head against her skin. It is a mad belief. An ill-founded faith. But it settles into his bones and eases the tremors in his skin. Allura believes. He does not want her to stop. He takes a breath instead of gasping desperately at the air.

When he tilts his face up, needing, she slides her hand against his jaw and kisses him. After a while, he feels settled enough to ask, “Is Kolivan still out there?”

#

Kolivan is on the bridge, heatedly discussing new strategies with Coran. He looks over when Shiro and Allura walk in, his gaze moving from Shiro’s face to his arm, and then back again. Surprise registers briefly across his expression, quickly suppressed. “That’s new,” he says.

“It was time for a change,” Shiro says, hoping to leave it at that. He does not want, suddenly, to explain what he is, though he feels like he should. Like it would be the responsible thing to do. All of their allies deserve to know what he truly is. Otherwise he is just stealing the real Shiro’s life, more so than he already is.

Kolivan grunts, apparently satisfied with that. Then again, if any group would understand vagaries and secrets, it would be the Blade. “You all fought well today. Smoothly.” There is a question in his expression, and the implication that they have not been fighting so smoothly in the recent past is in his tone.

“Shiro is piloting the Black Lion once more,” Allura says, answering the unspoken query. She steps over to the Castle’s controls, dismissing alerts and handling her post-battle responsibilities. Shiro feels guilty for dragging her all the way down to the hangar to coax him out of the Lion. If he were only—

Kolivan nods. ”Good,” he says. “We’ll need you at your full potential. Lotor is planning something.”

“Lotor is always planning something,” Allura says, frustration tinging her words. Shiro touches her shoulder, and Kolivan watches that too, his expression inscrutable.

“True enough, Princess,” Kolivan says. “But our intel regarding this plan is dire. Something’s spooked him. It’s got him gearing up for something big.”

Shiro frowns. It’s always something. Weariness drags at his mind, but the real Shiro could have handled this without hesitation. That means he can, too. “What else do you know about this plan of his?”

Kolivan shrugs. “Just that he wants to carry it out soon. He’s keeping the entire thing quiet. If we hear anything else, you’ll be the first to know. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have injured to see to.” Kolivan reaches out then, his hand open, and Shiro grips his arm, nodding his respect.

#

Shiro goes to check on the other Paladins, once Kolivan has returned to his ship. He should have talked to them immediately after the battle, and the guilt about failing to fulfill that duty itches at the back of his neck. He finds Hunk and Lance crashed out on the couches, pretending to argue with one another about whether or not they should go eat. They seem happy enough to see him, inviting him to join their lazy sprawl and chortling gleefully about Voltron’s new wings.

Shiro chats with them for a moment and excuses himself. Their mechanisms for recovery don’t suit him.

He finds Keith and Pidge in Keith’s quarters.

He stares, for a moment, taken by surprise. He does not remember Keith ever liking anyone in his space, but Pidge is sitting on the edge of his bunk with her legs folded and papers strewn across the mattress, her lap, and the floor. Keith stands in the doorway, looking uncomfortably up at Shiro. More papers cover his walls. There are star-charts and printed Galra reports. Two of the Castle’s mice are in the room as well, playing with balled up papers and making small little noises.

Shiro blinks. “Everything… alright in here?” He doesn’t know what else to ask. 

“Yeah, of course,” Pidge says, lifting her glasses and rubbing at her eyes. There is a bruise on her cheek. She looks her age and she almost died, along with all the rest of them. The knowledge scratches at the pit of Shiro’s stomach. He wishes he could remember how the real him handled it without wanting to throw up.

He asks, to distract himself, “Working on anything interesting?”

Keith shrugs. He has still not invited Shiro in. By this point, Shiro figures he probably isn’t planning on it. But at least Keith isn’t scowling and radiating frustration and hurt, the way he usually does. It’s an improvement Shiro is happy to accept. Most of the papers around the room are incomprehensible to Shiro, but, as he looks over Keith’s shoulder, trying to keep the moment from becoming overly awkward, he swears he seems something almost Lion-shaped in one of the print-outs.

“Kind of, maybe,” Pidge answers.

Keith snaps, “Pidge.”

“What?” She blinks at him. “I thought he asked you—”

“Pidge,” Keith looks equal parts frustrated and mortified. Shiro looks back and forth between them, another bad feeling settling into his gut. 

He asks, suddenly not wanting to, “Is this something I should know about?”

Pidge squirms, and Keith heaves a sigh, thumping his shoulder into the wall. “Sure, I guess. Whatever. Tell him.”

Pidge narrows her eyes at Keith for a moment and then shrugs and focuses her attention on Shiro. “Right. Well. We were trying to, um… figure out how you got, ah…”

“How you got the… other Shiro’s memories,” Keith says, picking up where Pidge stumbles over the explanation. Shiro stares at them, cold running down the back of his neck. He wishes he’d sat down beside Lance and Hunk and listened to them bicker about nothing. 

“They cloned me from him,” he says, pleased that his voice comes out steady. He didn’t realize this was a question. They cloned him. He’s a copy. He has copied memories. End of story.

“Mm.” Pidge picks at her socks, where they’re bunched around her ankles. “And that explains your genetic similarities, but no cloning process I’m aware of would duplicate memories. Coran doesn’t know of any, either. So.” She shrugs.

Shiro stares at them both. He wishes he weren’t standing in the hallway, but Keith makes no move to invite him in. “So, how do you think…?”

“My best guess is the arm,” Pidge says, gesturing at some of the random papers scattered around. “We know the programming in yours allowed the Galra to…” She flatters there, her expression going tense.

Shiro decides to spare them all. “To control me.”

“Yes.” She looks relieved. “Exactly. It makes sense that his could have some programming we didn’t know about. They could have recorded all kinds of things and then… I don’t know. Transferred the information, somehow.”

Keith shifts, then. His arms are crossed and he’s glaring hard at the ground. “What is the last thing you remember, anyway? From him?”

Shiro stares at him. Those last memories are a jumble of adrenaline and fear and determination. He doesn’t like to poke at them. But he does it anyway, shivering. “I remember… fighting Zarkon. I remember making our sword. I remember winning.” He shrugs, looking away. “And that’s it.”

Keith jerks out a nod. He doesn’t say anything else. Shiro clears his throat. He says, “Well. Keep me updated, I guess, if you learn anything definitive.”

“Will do,” Pidge says. Shiro nods and steps back, away. He feels itchy under his skin. He thinks, maybe, that he will go train. Or just run. Running until he cannot think sounds promising.

Keith follows him out into the hall, shutting the door and saying, “Hey, hold on.” He starts to reach out, his fingers almost brushing Shiro’s elbow before he catches himself. Shiro stares at him, unable to read his expression.

“Look,” Keith says, grimacing. “Look. I didn’t, before, I didn’t know—look.” He makes a frustrated sound and glares up at the ceiling momentarily, his arms crossed tight across his chest. His jaw ticks. “I get it, now, okay?” He taps the side of his head and meets Shiro’s gaze for an uncomfortable moment, and then shoves out his hand.

Shiro has no idea what he’s talking about. But he isn’t going to look so closely at this that he screws it up. He reaches out and takes Keith’s hand, knowing it should feel like more of a relief than it does. He will never have the same ties to Keith that the real Shiro does, though. He has accepted that. Keith frowns down at Shiro’s glowing fingers, and they release the grip after another second.

“Keith!” Pidge calls, as his door slides open. She sticks her head out. “Come here, I have to show you this!”

Keith steps back, nodding a goodbye, and Shiro watches him go. Pidge is talking about some new theory she just formulated when Keith pulls the door closed, leaving Shiro in the emptiness of the hallway.

#

“I hate waiting for Lotor to strike,” Allura says, without a preamble, when she steps into Shiro’s quarters that evening. He just got out of the shower, and she blinks rapidly, her mouth snapping shut as her cheeks color.

“It is frustrating,” Shiro agrees.

And she says, distracted, “Hm?”

He chuffs a soft laugh, the moment feeling slow and calm and good, after everything else the quintant dragged them through. He steps closer, and she winds her arms around his neck. When he lifts her, she wraps her legs around his hips, trusting him to hold her up, tilting her head back and giving him her throat, and—

And the things she does, the way she is with him, they punch the air from his lungs, sometimes. He wants to wrap her close and keep her safe. He wants to hoard each touch, each mad expression of trust and faith. He tries to show her with his hands, and mouth, and body, and is not sure if he succeeds.

At the very least, they escape thinking about Lotor for a little while.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, guys, that warning for character death was not for show, just fyi.
> 
> That said, this is part of a series, so I'm not leaving everyone where they are at the end of this.

Kolivan must be right about Lotor planning something, because the Prince makes himself scarce, after that. They run into him, off and on, and he abandons the field of battle every time, before they can even get started.

It gives them time to spread their cause, to free three civilizations, to make actual progress. It gives Shiro time to get used to waking up beside Allura, her hair in his face and her skin soft against his. It gives him time to get comfortable piloting Black and flying with the others. It gives him time to keep searching for the real Shiro—though he never succeeds.

There are more mentions of this other Lion, always in sectors on the other side of the universe, far away from anywhere they’ve yet had reason to travel. Shiro assumes it might have something to do with whatever Lotor is planning, but there isn’t enough information about it to be sure, and they don’t have the time or resources to track it down at the moment. Besides, looking into it might be playing into Lotor’s hands.

Perhaps Lotor managed to build a Lion of his own. He has the ability, now. Shiro wonders how they would fare against such a fate, how they’d measure up against another weapon with all of Voltron’s capabilities.

He can’t see such a fight ending in anything but heavy casualties on both sides.

He takes what comfort he can in the knowledge that the reports only mention _one_ Lion. Maybe it’s just a prototype. Maybe Lotor, if he is behind it, won’t be able to make anymore. Maybe it’s only a story, propaganda spread to maintain hope in areas of the universe they haven’t reached.

It would be nice to be able to believe that.

#

There are some things Shiro never gets used to, like undoing the tiny clasps down the back of Allura’s dress after a state dinner with some potential new allies that dragged and dragged. She holds her hair out of the way, her neck curved prettily as she buries a yawn in her hand. “That didn’t go too badly, did it?” she asks.

He hums. Fabric parts beneath his ministrations. Her dress is surprisingly heavy and complicated to get on and off. She carefully extricates an arm, and he watches, always fascinated. “It went as well as it could have gone,” he says.

She sighs and nods. A grimace passes across her features. “Their initial demands were ridiculous. To try to require a marriage was absurd.” She scoffs.

Shiro looks away for a moment, hiding a sudden scowl. Ridiculous was not how he would have phrased it, but… He says, “King Herustice seemed… alright.” The King was tall and striking, and in control of two systems worth of planets, with a fleet he’d already managed to wrest from Galra control. He’d spent the entire meal attempted to speak with Allura, his proposition sitting in the air between them like an explosion waiting to happen.

Shiro dislikes him immensely, but is aware enough to know it has nothing to do with his character.

Allura touches his arm, tilting her head to the side and spilling her hair across one shoulder. Her eyes are sharp with consideration. “I will not marry him,” she says, quiet and firm, and it eases a tension Shiro wasn’t even aware he was nursing.

He says, “Good,” and then flushes at the look on her face. “I mean, it would be—you have the right—”

“Shiro,” she interrupts, shifting her weight and glancing up at him, sudden shyness in her expression. Her bare skin makes her seem more exposed. He hates, suddenly, that he is still fully dressed. “I am not available for his proposal. Or any other’s. You… know this, do you not?”

He shivers, unsure what to say. He manages, “Allura… I can’t offer you, I mean, I’m just…” He gestures at himself, helplessly. He’s not even a real person. She has a King willing to court her, and there will be others, how could there not be? She is meant to be a Queen. He sees it every time he looks at her. “Maybe you should, maybe it would be better for you if—”

She grabs his chin, then, forcing him to meet her gaze, her eyes blazing in the dim light of her quarters. “You told me you loved me,” she says, accusatory.

He stares back at her, floundering. “I do,” he says, rough and low.

“Then there is no ‘better.’ You are everything I want,” she says, and she pushes up onto her toes, her mouth fitting against his. She kisses like fire, and he is happy to burn. He knows she is wrong, but he cannot bring himself to protest.

#

Later, when they are a tangle of limbs, she twists so that her chin is perched on his shoulder. Her fingers trace fitfully over the curve of his ribs, where the Galra lovingly recreated a ragged scar, earned by the real Shiro in the gladiatorial arena. He turns his head on the pillow to peer across at her. He can hear her thinking, and asks, “What’s wrong?”

“Hm?” She blinks, and some of the tension around her mouth eases. She looks more thoughtful than anything else. “Nothing is wrong, exactly.”

He strokes a hand down her back. “Alright,” he says. “Well, what are you thinking about, then?”

She sighs and shifts, her cheek soft on his chest. She is comforting, simply pressed against him. Her body is warmer than his, always, and there is something so soothing about the touch of her skin. He never tires of it. “There is something you should know,” she says, finally. “It is not… urgent. Now is not the time to do anything with it. But I, well, I went to the infirmary earlier, and—”

“Princess!” Coran’s voice interrupts, coming over the speakers in a blare so loud that it hurts. “Paladins! We’re having a bit of an emergency!”

And that is when the first explosion rocks the ship.

#

The emergency turns out to be Lotor and three fleets worth of Galra, pouring into the space around them, surrounding them, closing them in.

They scramble into their uniforms and Shiro runs for the Black Lion as Allura takes off for the bridge. There is no time to call a goodbye, or to kiss her one more time. The Galra are pulling no punches. “Where’d they all come from?” Lance demands over the comms. “Why didn’t we pick them up on the scanners?”

“Something was blocking our systems,” Coran answers, his voice loud in Shiro’s helmet. “I’m trying to identify—oh.”

“’Oh’ what? Man, don’t leave us hanging,” Hunk says, as Shiro slides into Black, his blood pumping fast, his thoughts narrowing in focus to the coming fight.

“King Herustice… the blocking signal came from his castle.”

“What?” Keith yells, but Shiro cannot manage that much vitriol. They have been betrayed before. He is beginning to expect it. Besides, they have more pressing issues at the moment. Ships surround the Castle, holding nothing back in the attack.

“We’ll handle Herustice later,” Shiro instructs. “Let’s get the Castle some breathing room. Princess, we need to get out of here.” There are too many Galra to take on, all at once. Allowing Lotor to determine the field of battle never works out in their favor. And they obviously do not need to stay and defend their new allies. It seems Herustice’s people have already chosen their side.

“Understood,” Allura says. “I am preparing a wormhole now, I—”

“Paladins of Voltron.” Lotor’s voice is silky smooth. It radiates smugness right through Shiro’s helmet, and Shiro’s stomach sours with anger. “Inhabitants of the Castle of Lions. I recommend you shut down your wormhole drive at once.”

Lance scoffs, “Yeah, well, I recommend _you_ shut your quiznaking—”

“Or,” Lotor continues, talking over Lance. “You will be leaving the inhabitants of the surrounding solar systems to perish in a most horrible fashion. It is, of course, your decision.”

For a beat, there is silence. And then Allura demands, “What are you talking about?”

Lotor chuckles. Shiro grits his teeth so hard his jaw throbs. “Perhaps you have noticed the transport ship I have brought along? I believe,” he says, “that you will find the answers you’re looking for there.” And although they shout across the radios, he doesn’t say anything else.

#

“Pidge,” Shiro snaps, cutting Galra fighters to pieces, trying to bring this battle under some semblance of control. “Do you have any idea what Lotor was talking about?”

“Give me a minute,” Pidge calls back. “I’m looking—oh. Princess. Coran. Are you…?”

“We see it,” Coran replies. He sounds gutted.

“Someone want to share with the rest of the class?” Lance yells, freezing a row of fighters, his nerves creeping through in his voice.

“It’s a bomb,” Pidge says.

“A _huge_ bomb,” Hunk adds. “Like, holy cow, that thing is packing with so much radioactive material it’s not even—I mean. He wasn’t joking when he said it could take out two solar systems. We’d be lucky if it only took out two solar systems.”

“Will it damage Voltron?” Keith asks, his pragmatism unsurprising.

“Uh, maybe not?” Hunk makes a soft sound. “But it will definitely damage everyone else. So maybe we should… do something about that?”

“Look,” Lance says, “the Galra aren’t even leaving. Are we sure this thing is going to even go off? Maybe Lotor is just bluffing to make us stick around and get our butts kicked?”

“He’s not bluffing,” Allura says. “These readings are impossible to misunderstand. But the Galra have developed some kind of shielding for their vessels. It is similar in composition to the comet material they stole, and—”

“Can we mimic it?” Shiro interrupts, because their time is running out, draining away. He can feel it. 

“Not quickly enough,” Coran says, his voice flat and grim.

“Okay, so let’s get rid of it,” Lance suggests. “We can do that, right? Allura already has a wormhole ready, right? Can’t we just pick some sun somewhere and whoosh, push it through? Problem solved?”

“No,” Allura says, “They’ve… they’re using some kind of gravity anchor. It will hold the ship _here_. If we try to push it through a wormhole… Well. We could tear a permanent hole in space.”

Lance asks, “And that would be bad?”

“It would destroy far more than two systems,” Allura replies.

“Can we turn it off? The gravity anchor?” Shiro asks, dividing his attention between the battle and the bomb, grunting as he takes a hit while distracted.

“I mean, I think so,” Pidge says, her voice strained. “But only technically. If we got close enough to disarm it we’d, uh. We’d die. The radiation levels are way too high.”

Shiro looks at the ship. It looks, relatively, unthreatening. It’s just a standard Galra vessel, all black and purple and sharp lines. He swallows. Something cold settles in his gut. “Immediately?” he asks. “Would we die immediately?”

“Uh… no? We’d have a few minutes, but—”

“But that’s crazy, because, again, we would _die_.” Hunk laughs, nervously.

“Would the explosion only take out these two systems? The ones King Herustice controls?” Keith asks, and for a moment there is quiet.

“There are billions of people in these systems,” Allura says, soft. “Billions. Not all of them are complicit in this attack.”

Shiro can almost hear Keith’s grimace. “I’m just—”

“We’re not going to leave them. We’ll figure something out,” Shiro lies. He looks at the ship. He already knows what has to be done. It’s obvious.

“Okay, great,” Hunk says. “Does anyone have any ideas?”

#

They argue about the bomb sitting in their midst, the perfect trap Lotor sprang. The ship floats before them, anchored to the artificial well of gravity, the charge in it building higher and higher with each second. There are two inhabited worlds within the reach of the explosion. They blink brightly on Shiro’s screen, notations about their populations circling them. Billions will die when this monstrosity blows.

“Why can’t we just push it through a wormhole again?” Lance demands, his voice cracking across the comms, his emotions sour with fear. Shiro pushes that connection away, purposefully. He shuts it down, or hopes he does. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, not really.

“It is _anchored in place_.” Allura snaps back, strain in her voice. Shiro cannot feel her emotions. He wonders, fleetingly, what it would have been like to pilot with her, to touch the silvery filaments of her mind and be touched by them in return. 

He never will, now.

“I guess that means we can’t just, like, drag it away, either,” Hunk says. “Right? We can’t just take it somewhere where it won’t hurt anyone? Hey, Shiro, where are you going? Guys? Where is Shiro going?”

“Pidge said the artificial gravity well could be shut down,” Shiro says, calm and surprised by it. He’d thought, briefly, that he would have to feign the steadiness of his voice, but it comes easily enough. Maybe he _is_ something like the real Shiro, after all.

“I said hypothetically!” Pidge yells. “ _Hypothetically_ we could shut it down, if we were completely immune to _radiation_.” Shiro turns off the alarms suddenly blaring through the cabin, warnings about hazardous levels of radiation that flash in brilliant red all around his head. Black pushes at his thoughts, concerned.

“It’s okay,” he says, to the others, to Black, to Allura. He shows Black what has to be done and for a moment he feels something like horror from her. But they are connected. They understand one another, in that moment, the way she understood the real Shiro. She accepts his decision with a swell of pride, and he lets out a shuddery breath of relief. 

This has to be done. And he knows Allura well enough to know that she is seconds away from realizing it herself. She will try to fix it, the way she fixed the Balmera, the way she put herself between Voltron and Zarkon, and he—he can’t allow it. He can’t lose her. And he won’t ask any of the others to do it. They are too important. They’re his team.

But he is just a clone. An imitation of something good. They can fly Voltron without him. They did it before.

They’ll do it again.

“What are you doing?” Allura demands. He does not need a connection with her to hear the fear in her voice. He knows her well enough that it is obvious. It would be easier, he thinks, if it were not. “You need to—Shiro! No! I forbid you from doing this!”

“I’m sorry, Princess,” he says, and he lands on the side of the booby-trapped ship, and Black shoves her head into the side, making him a door. Allura screams into his helmet. It sounds like someone is tearing her chest open. He squeezes his eyes shut and grits his teeth. He disables the comm line to the Castle. He will not be able to do this, otherwise. And it must be done. Billions will die.

The others are quiet. He can feel, distantly, where he has blocked it off, their shock and terror.

“Okay, Pidge,” he says, stepping out of Black. “You’re going to have to tell me what to do.”

“You need to get out of there right now,” Pidge says. She sounds dazed. “The radiation—”

“I’m already over-exposed,” Shiro says. “So just tell me what I need to do.”

#

Pidge guides him through the ship. He doesn’t have far to go. Black either got lucky, or sensed the general area where the gravity well was located. The ship is not empty. There are Galra, here and there, through the halls. They are collapsed in heaps. None of them are breathing. There are no marks on them.

Shiro moves past them without looking. When he reaches the control room, he shoves the Galra collapsed across the console aside.

“Alright,” he says, “I’m here.” He pulls up the control screens, looking at information that means nothing to him. “What now, Pidge?”

She gives him clipped instructions, bitten off between attacks. He can hear the battle through the comms. He knows they’re taking a beating. But he can’t do anything about that. He throws switches, lowers field generators, takes apart the system Lotor set up to wipe out two solar systems. Sweat rolls down his back and a headache grows inside his temples. His vision wobbles and he sways to one side, the vertigo sudden and unexpected.

“Shiro?” Pidge asks, her voice strained. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah,” he says, and it is a slur. He shakes his head. His fingers and lips are going numb. “Yeah, am I almost done, because…?” He forgets what he was going to say next. He is so nauseous. He doesn’t want to throw up in his helmet.

She makes a tiny sound, hurt. She says, “Yeah, Shiro, you’re almost done.”

“Good.” He blinks at the controls, trying to remember what she told him to do last. “Tell Allura. To get ready.”

“She knows,” Keith says. His words are clipped. His agony is so thick and unexpected that it pushes against the shield Shiro put between them. Or maybe it is just getting more difficult to hold them all at a distance. He is so dizzy.

Shiro nods and then remembers they can’t see him. He obeys a few more instructions and the low hum that had surrounded him fades abruptly, all at once. He hears the others cry out. It sounds relieved. He stumbles to one side, grabs for the console, and misses it.

The floor feels nice.

“Tell Allura,” he slurs, through the headache drilling into his temples. “Tell her I love her.”

There is only static over his comm. He kneels there, numb to his elbows, and he wonders if they did not hear him. His thoughts run in tight little circles. She can’t not know. She can’t. He grabs the console and drags his body upright. He can’t feel his feet. The room wobbles and swims, but he can feel Black, tugging at him.

He stumbles and trips. He hauls himself back up. He bumps into a dead man, sways to the side, and lands against Black’s head. Crawling into her mouth is automatic. It takes the last of his energy. But that is alright. She takes it from there.

#

Shiro lays on the floor of the cockpit. He bumps his hands against his helmet, but his fingers don’t work, so he gives up taking it off. His comms come back and he can hear people yelling, telling him to get out of the way, get out of the way right now, Shiro, I cannot hold it any longer—

“He made it!” Lance yells, chortling, his voice so loud that it makes Shiro’s ears ring. “He did it! I can’t believe it! Take that, Lotor, you utter tool!”

Shiro wonders who he is talking about. He hopes that whoever it is did something about the ship that was about to explode. He swallows at the bile filling his mouth. The world swirls around and around so he closes his eyes. It doesn’t help.

He drifts.

#

“Gods!” That is Allura’s voice.

Shiro cracks his eyes. They feel gummy. Cold air rushes over his face, and that is nice, it’s so nice. He hears a distant clatter, and then his head is lifted and turned. Allura’s face swims into his field of vision. There is nothing but horror in her beautiful eyes. He wonders how she got onto Black. He doesn’t really care. He’s just happy to see her.

He raises an arm, clumsy, and manages to touch her cheek. “Hey,” he says, and it hurts. He coughs, and she makes a terrible sound.

“I’ve got you,” she says, and the world moves. It takes him a tick to realize that she picked him up, as though he weighed nothing at all. “I’ve got you, you’re going to be fine now.”

He shakes his head. He doesn’t think she sees him.

#

Allura carries him out of the Black Lion. He is vaguely aware of her strong arms curled around him, of the smell of her hair, of the lights overhead. Everything feels very far away. He can hear voices, shouted questions, pleas for help, explosions, but they are distant. They don’t matter. His eyes drift shut and he wonders if maybe he will just not open them again, but then Allura calls his name, and he does.

He is lying down, in the infirmary. Allura is yelling at Coran. She stops when Shiro tries to sit up and fails, collapsing back onto the mattress with a moan. She leans over him in an instant, shushing him, petting at his hair. “Feels nice,” he slurs, curling his hand around her wrist and tugging. He wants… he doesn’t know what he wants.

She understands anyway, and makes a wet, terrible sound before crawling onto the bed, stretching out beside him. “It’s going to be alright,” she tells him, as he curls against her. Her voice fades in and out, just a little. Breathing is getting harder. At least he no longer feels nauseous. He can’t really feel his stomach at all.

“No,” he tells her, fumbling his hand up to press a finger against her mouth when she tries to protest. “Not this time, Princess.”

“Shiro,” she says, and her voice breaks. “Don’t. Please don’t do this to me. I can’t lose you. I can’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs, and his head is so heavy. His hand is so heavy. He drops it back to the bed. “Had to be done.”

“Don’t leave me,” she pleads, and he hates it, hearing the anguish in her voice.

It is too late for that. He is already leaving her. He’s mostly gone. He can feel it. There is nothing to be done about it. His vision is graying out. Already the world looks vague and shapeless. “I’m so glad I loved you,” he tells her, because it is important that she knows. He came back to make sure she knew. She makes a terrible sound, wet. He feels her mouth, pressed against his forehead.

He feels his right arm disappear, his body no longer able to power the bayard. The weapon reappears, heavy, in his left hand and he manages to lift it, barely, to bump it into her arm until she takes it. “Shiro,” she says, begging. “I love you, please, please—”

“Sh,” he says, and his eyes are open, but he can’t see anything. There is just darkness. His breath rattles. It hurts. Everything hurts. The ship is rocking. They are still in the middle of a battle. “You should… go.” He swallows convulsively, hating the words. He doesn’t want her to leave. He doesn’t want to die, alone in the dark. But. But it doesn’t matter, what he wants. He’s just… “They need—” 

“No,” she says, her voice breaking. She kisses his brow, his cheek, his mouth. “No. I won’t leave you.”

He shudders in relief. He turns his face against her skin. He listens to her soft sobs. He feels, in the back of his head, the faint presence of Black. He is not alone. It is more than he dared hope for. More than he deserved. They all gave him so much more than he deserved, over and over again.

He is so glad he found them. He is so glad they found him. He is…so tired. 

“Thank you,” he murmurs, and he can’t, he can’t remember, he—

He shuts his eyes.

He goes to sleep.

She is still with him, right up to the end.

**Coda**

“Guys? Guys! Listen, we _need_ the Black Lion, we’re getting—” Hunk cuts off with a sound of relief when, as though summoned by the latest plea, the Black Lion streaks out of the Castle, cutting down a line of Galra fighters in a single vicious movement.

The others cry out in relief and shock. They were told it was impossible to survive what Shiro did, but in that moment, they all accept and believe that he did. In that moment, they are joyful.

“Hey, Shiro?” Lance calls out, turning on the Galra that had been hounding him, suddenly rejuvenated. “You sure you’re okay, man?”

“No,” Allura says, and her voice is some cold, hard thing. It flash-freezes the fragile joy that had flared within them. Nothing comes across the Paladin connection from her. It is like feeling a wall. “He’s not,” she says. And she touches them, then, with determination so pure and focused that they are moving towards her immediately, without a word spoken, drawn in like planets to a star.

Around them the Galra change their attack formations, preparing for a battle with five Lions. The Black Lion gazes across them all, a chill anger spreading from one Paladin to the other.

Allura stares forward, Shiro’s helmet unfamiliar and heavy, weighing down her head. Tear tracks dry against her skin. Her heart aches in her chest like an open wound. She says, calm and terrible, “Form Voltron.”

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am a bad person. You can come yell at me on tumblr, if you want over [here](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/andtheblueberrymuffin)


End file.
